A month in classics: February
Our guest classical music picker, Huw Lewis selects some highlights for this month
There’s much more to Ravel than Bolero… There was a time when the thought of a whole concert devoted to Maurice Ravel would leave me cold – but now I am chomping at the bit for what’s coming to the Glasshouse in February.
The French composer has often been a divisive figure, as well as struggling for recognition in his lifetime. Now, 150 years on from his birth, he is rightly celebrated as among the greats from his country.
But it was not always so: Ravel tried repeatedly – and failed repeatedly and to his fury – to win France’s leading composition prize. Fast forward to the 1980s and the music teacher we met on our school’s French exchange trip to Lyons had never even heard of him.
The irony was every English boy and girl in our class knew all about Ravel’s Bolero, thanks to the Olympic champion ice skaters Torvill and Dean. That piece, with its obsessive (some would say monotonous) driving rhythm was Ravel’s big hit even in his lifetime.
And he grew to hate it as a banal crowd-pleaser overshadowing his ‘better’ works, just as Ravel himself was overshadowed by the big tunes and big legacy of Berlioz and Saint-Saens, and by his contemporary and more-showy rival Debussy.
A younger me was quick to write off Ravel, between the over-familiarity of Bolero and the misapprehension that his ballet scores and solo piano works were watery and insipid.
Which just goes to show youth is wasted on the young, because for decades I wrote off music that is exotic, ravishing and shimmering by turns. Ravel draws on a wide pool of references – Chinese classical music, jazz, Spanish rhythms and Basque folk tunes from his southern upbringing among them, to create a sophisticated sound world totally his own.
Now I am making up for lost time – and when the BBC Philharmonic come to the Glasshouse on February 21, Ravel shall have his hour.
The concert programme is special enough, with three jewels of pure Ravel plus his masterful orchestration of Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, packed with familiar tunes and complete with a roof-lifting finale.
Throw the beguiling French pianist Bertrand Chamayou into the mix and here you have a night to remember. Chamayou knows his Ravel, with his recordings of the complete solo piano music displaying a special intimacy and gentle appreciation of the composer.
At The Glasshouse he will perform the D Major Piano Concerto, the less well known of Ravel’s two concertos and written to be played entirely with the left hand. That’s because it was composed for the pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who lost his right arm in World War One (and whom the ever-divisive Ravel fell out with before the first performance).
As such its one of two pieces on the bill touched by the Great War – the concert opens with La Valse, a distorted deconstruction of a Strauss-like Waltz said to have been provoked by the ruination of Viennese culture amid the slaughter Austria and German triggered in 1914.
Whether that’s true or not the 12-minute journey from elegant twirling dance to crashing conclusion is the work of a composer at the top of his game.
Among the greats of French Music? No – Ravel is the greatest.
Five more highlights for the month (or so) ahead
Another French composer takes his bow at The Glasshouse on February 16. Gabriel Fauré is known mainly for his serene and transquil Requiem, and its famous Pie Jesu sequence. This Sunday afternoon concert in memory of Glasshouse concertgoer Peter Stattersfield features that choral work alongside lesser known works, with the Royal Northern Sinfonia under the baton of Sofi Jeannin.
Sinfonia principal conductor Dinis Sousa will conjure a very different sound world on February 22 with a concert by arch modernists John Cage, Pauline Oliveros, Pierre Boulez and Gyorgy Ligeti. Constantly intriguing, this is music Jim, but not as we know it.
I don’t know much about the Spanish group Cuarteto Quiroga, but I do like the pieces they are bringing to Gateshead (March 8). The concerts starts with the first string quartet of Haydn’s bracing opus 74 set, ends with Beethoven’s late great opus 132 and has a complete unknown sandwiched in between – Argentinian Alberto Ginastero’s First Quartet from 1948.
Opera North hit Newcastle for their spring visit at the start of March (March 6-8) with Mozart’s Magic Flute for all you lovers of vocal fireworks as the Queen of the Night hits the high notes; Soprano Anna Davies takes on the role. There’s also the Flying Dutchman for… well, for people who like Wagner.
Royal Philharmonic Orchestra – Relaxed Performance at Sunderland Fire Station (March 8) is something very different: an afternoon event for people who find traditional concerts challenging to attend, including adults and children with learning disabilities, movement disorders, sensory impairments, autistic spectrum disorder, dementia and other neurological conditions, or those with young children or babies. That’s a great idea.